When
did the conversation about uplifting the poor lose political traction
in the U.S.? It’s no longer considered good form --
even in progressive circles -- to mention the desperate plight
of the growing number of Americans who are economically disadvantaged, systematically marginalized
or chronically underprivileged. We’re now invited to turn
our attention to the hardships faced by the “working poor”
and “low-income families” -- as if some critical
distinction exists between those who are merely impoverished
and those who are absolutely destitute; as if they are not precisely the same people at different points in their life course and employment
history.

I suspect this reframing
of the poverty problem has occurred, in part, because it’s
become culturally unfashionable to embrace the opinion that some Americans --
due to their race, or sex, or age, or maternal status, or circumstances
of birth, or random and unfavorable conditions beyond their control --
do not have equal access to the same opportunities enjoyed by those
born near the top of the social and economic heap. Even to suggest
such a thing is dangerously liberal in a political moment when the
term “liberal” is used as a pejorative.

Those who of us who lean to the left are advised by those on the right that the time has come to forget about all
that crazy economic justice stuff and put our faith in job creation
and the power of privatization-plus-personal-responsibility to resolve
the nation’s most vexing socioeconomic problems. Beyond that,
national discussions about poverty reduction tend to center on the
U.S. commitment (such as it is) to relieving devastating economic
inequality in the developing world, and not what should be done to alleviate
the home-grown variety.

Which seems either simple-minded,
or misguided, or both -- because poverty is a pressing problem
in the United States, especially for women and children. Yes, the
U.S. is the wealthiest nation in the world. Yes, the U.S. does have the highest per capita income of all economically
advanced countries. The U.S. also has the highest
rate of overall poverty and the highest rate of child
poverty of all affluent nations tracked by the OECD.
And despite recent reports of an economic turnaround, the poverty
situation is getting worse. According to the U.S.
Census Bureau, the nation’s official poverty rate rose
from 12.1 percent in 2002 to 12.5 percent in 2003. More than 35.7
million Americans live below the poverty line -- including 24.2
million young women and children -- and an additional 15.2 million
women and children live in near-poverty. Over 10 million women and
children in the U.S. live in deep poverty, measured as households with
incomes less than 50 percent of the official poverty line. In 2003, 6.1 million
households headed by single parent women with children under 18 -- 60 percent of all such households -- made
do on less than $25,000 a year.

By comparison, just over
9 million Americans (that’s less than 5 percent of the
adult population) have annual earnings of $100,000 or more.
(Guess who is more likely to reap the benefits of the Bush administration’s
recent tax cuts?) New
studies on growing income inequality in the U.S. suggest the prospect of upward mobility is extremely limited. Even in the
strongest economy, destitute families may be able to work themselves
out of abject poverty but few are likely to achieve long-term financial
security.

The official reaction
to this unsightly blemish on America’s celebrated record of
prosperity has been to re-examine the moral and social consequences
of the distribution of aid to the poor. By the early 1970s, the
War on Poverty was over, and the War on Welfare -- and the mothers
who depend on it to support their families -- was underway. Welfare
was recast as the cause of poverty and social decay rather than
a flawed and incomplete response to it; tough-minded lawmakers concluded
that the system’s principal shortcoming was providing cash
benefits to poor women who gave birth to children out of wedlock -- children they feared were destined to repeat the cycle of poverty.

Rather than addressing
the complex network of social, cultural and economic conditions
that permit poverty to flourish in the shadow of astonishing wealth,
attention shifted to the reproductive behavior of poor women and
how public policy might be used to control it, although the stated rationale was reducing
social spending and promoting self-sufficiency. This strategy moved
to a new level in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan launched
a highly successful campaign to convince taxpayers that the typical welfare recipient -- whom Reagan and his henchmen
notoriously branded as “Welfare Queens” -- was flagrantly
indolent, willfully ignorant, sexually promiscuous, recklessly fertile
and living large on the public dime.

Despite pressure from
conservative factions to cut spending on social programs, legislators
resisted reducing or placing limits on welfare benefits until 1996,
when Bill Clinton set in motion the deft political slight-of-hand
that transformed “welfare as we knew it” into the Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. Thus
was Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC -- a meager
cash benefit for desperately poor mothers and their children --
scuttled in favor of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families
(TANF) -- a meager cash benefit with work requirements and a
five-year lifetime limit.